LG discovers the power of functional, seductive design – and chocolate.
LG Electronics’ motto is ‘Life’s good’, which seems pretty apt at the moment. Awards too numerous to mention, a doubling of brand awareness for the last two years, global sales of more than £19bn, number one in the world for plasma TVs and number five for mobile phones – life’s good alright.
Design has always been key to LG’s culture. The company, set up in 1958, broke new ground in Korea by hiring an industrial designer, and just a year later set up a department which focused purely on product design.
In the last two years LG has won 50 prestigious Red Dot design awards, with products such as the sexy KG800 phone (more famous as the ‘Chocolate’ phone) and the sophisticated new Prada phone leading the charge in 2007, being praised by the awards’ creator Professor Peter Zec for “focusing on human needs in the digital age”.
There is nothing especially chocolatey about the KG800, LG just thought the name would help people remember it. And, as it sold 10 million units in the first 17 months, they were right.
The chocolate tag was not a one-off. Hee-Gook Lee, LG’s president and chief technical officer, wants the company to create “playful, fun-to-use” products and believes “a great emphasis on a premium design strategy” enhances LG’s brand value.
A very great emphasis: LG spent £1.5bn on R&D last year and it has set its sights on becoming one of the top three consumer electronics and telecommunications companies by 2010. It has 25 R&D labs around the world – its strategy being ‘global localisation’, a design thrust that comes from understanding the differences between the world’s marketplaces and cultures.
We broadened the concept of ‘haptic’ design to all five senses – touch, smell, the glowing lights and all the emotional things
LG strives for design that is at once minimalist and seductive. Designers are encouraged to “experiment in a playful manner with fresh ideas and unusual combinations,” but vice president Jae-Jin Shim says LG is not interested in design for design’s sake, warning that it can conceal the “underlying beauty of the product”.
Kim Jin, the chief of LG Electronics’ mobile phone design lab, says: “LG’s design philosophy is to appeal to customers’ emotions”. She says the concept was originally called ‘haptic’ design. “It originally meant the feeling of touch, but we broadened the concept to all five senses – touch, smell, the glowing lights, all the emotional things.”
Jin encourages her designers to do what she calls “town-watching”, sending them out to the chic streets of Hongdae or Cheongdam-dong. “Each time they go, they can see differences in the shops and in the people even from a month before. Designers need to catch such subtle differences.” On one of these trips, she noticed a trend towards more natural shapes and this inspired the Chocolate phone.
The Chocolate phone was the world’s first mobile handset with a touch-sensitive keypad. Jin says “a single success does not make a company a true leader”. LG has taken ‘emotional design’ a step further, adding a lavender scent to the keypad of the ‘White Chocolate’ phone, sold as a limited edition for Valentine’s Day last year. Whatever next? One that cries real tears when you get dumped?
Article first published in Design Council Magazine, Issue 2, Summer 2007